Creative Excess

Thu Jul 14 – Mom reminded me that I did not tell you the story of my amazing first aid kit, to shame all first aid kits.

On July Fourth, at Jan’s, some people naturally were walking around barefoot. What we didn’t expect was for Mom to step on a bee. Stinger first, of course.

So she hobbled around the pool, calling out for help, and I immediately ran to my car and got my first aid kit. My thought was to clean out the wound, have antiseptic cream and a bandage ready, plus administer an antihistamine just in case of any allergic reaction.

What I did *not* plan for were the Oooo’s and Aahhhh’s over the kit itself. It just seems normal to me to have “anything you could need” in my custom-built kit, but I guess I have to admit it’s fairly impressive. Certainly my favorite feature (this says a lot about me) is the “Table of Contents” I finally wrote up one day to be able to scan and look for “What’s missing. What needs to be restocked. What else should I buy…” and not have to paw through the whole box to see if I own something.

Now, this kit has taken five years to build, so it’s really not *that* big of a deal. But I do have a ton of pain relievers, cold or flu remedies, antiseptic cream, bandages, bandaids, gauze, scissors, a mirror, hydrogen peroxide, alcohol, q-tips, cotton balls, lozenges, tums, and even non-latex sterile gloves, among other things. Who knows, the next time someone needs gloves it might be someone who’s allergic to latex. *grin*

Mom, Jan, and Aunt Joan were thoroughly impressed.

Oh, and we got the stinger out, cleansed and numbed the wound, and administered antihistamines “just in case.” All was well.

So, just when I was feeling all multi-taski, I get hit with a huge project at work that has to be turned around in two days. So I’ve had to pause my “code a little here, work a little there, check an email here, code a little there, work a little here” methodology and hunker down. Of course, lunch time is mine and I *will* use and enjoy my lunch!

* * * * *

Cheryl’s training guide was the one we were suddenly converting so that some guys in Japan could translate it and host a class for the software that someone else had sold. Turns out the one I was working on in the morning wasn’t the most recent version of the manual, so all I got for the first 2+ hours work was an awful lot of practice for *how* to process the files and the automation scripts. Late in the afternoon Cheryl came in from working at home, found the right version, and she and I went through the whole thing from scratch one more time. It was a ton of fun, just flying through the process and turning out an amazing amount of work in a short time. And having two people to do the final quality check on the finished materials certainly shortened the completion time. We now know we can flip a book in less than a day, which will certainly happen again now that we know we can do it.

After all that, I was able to jump back onto the theatre website again. Hope had worked up all the CSS code based on my new color palette, condensed a few features back down into the coldfusion “includes” (little pieces of code that say “include this file here” and “include that file there” so you can have referenced pieces parts in a library that can be easily updated once, fixed throughout all at the same time), and a few of the updates that my Mom had requested. So once I synched up all the files, it was time to look through all the rest of the updates in Mom’s emails, and one by one start implementing them. It actually went much faster than I thought it would, and less than two hours later I was ready for a final review.

It astonishes me that we flipped this web site redesign in basically two days. Now, yes, we didn’t have to write the content (it was either incorporated from the old site or supplied by Mom), and we “stole” a lot of the code from our shire website, but still. Wow. This is getting easier and faster, every time we put our minds to it.

Now I just have my church site redesign, the new Bardic Arts site for our Kingdom, the community choir I’m part of and that new site….

I think I’ll be able to do all three of those with my current development skills. But I still need to learn PHP and SQL so that I can start doing my photo album ideas. No rest for the creative, hmm?

Speaking of, band rehearsal was *really* amazing tonight. We worked almost exclusively on songs for our upcoming 3rd CD, and I really like the way they’re taking shape. The longer orchestral song has me stumped for melody and lyrics, but fortunately our guitarist (who wrote the song) already had a full melody in mind, so he’s going to fix that one up for me. He wrote the main portion of lyrics for one of the new songs, that I’ve just redeveloped. And I’ve written one full set of lyrics so far. There’s at least two more that I need to finish immediately, but I think just a few evenings in front of my computer should wrap them up. I just have to set aside the time on purpose, so I’m not unprepared the next time we’re in the studio.

Tomorrow should be filled with organizing and running errands, since I think it’s going to be a weekend-on-the-road. Two friends of mine are going through a sudden divorce, and so several of us are helping her clean up and/or move out on Saturday. Saturday night is supposed to be a dinner party / roast for another friend. Sunday will include church and fighter practice, plus the second summer planning meeting for the community chorus I’m helping to found. (Oh, and I’m the conductor. How did that happen?) So I’ll need to spend Saturday night in town, minimum, and possibly Friday night if I can get organized quickly enough.

I think you used that kit for me a couple of times at work. I still remember you telling me to keep my finger out of my mouth when it was bleeding! I miss you! your organizational skills! your humor and laughter too!